Tom Cain - The accident man

The time had come. He took a deep breath, then let the air out slowly, dropping his shoulders, easing the muscles, twisting his neck, and rotating his head to loosen the top of his spinal cord. Then he looked back at the road.

Several hundred meters away, beyond the entrance of the underpass, he saw a black Mercedes. It was traveling fast. Way too fast.

Behind the Merc was the reason for its desperate speed. A motorcycle was chasing it, buzzing around the big black car like a wasp around a buffalo. There was a passenger riding in a pillion, carrying a camera, leaning away from his seat and firing his flashgun, apparently oblivious to his own safety. He looked for all the world like a paparazzo, risking his neck for an exclusive shot.

"Nice work," thought Carver, watching the speed team doing their job. He started his bike and got ready to move.

For a second, he imagined the passengers in the car, urging their driver to pull away from the relentless pursuit of the bike.

Everything was going according to plan. Carver rolled downhill toward the road leading from the underpass.

As he reached the junction with the main road, a gray Citroen BX hatchback emerged from the underpass. Carver let it go, noting the two Arab men in the driver's and passenger's seats. Another car went by, a Ford Ka. Then Carver rode his bike out into the middle of the road.

He crossed to the far side, then turned the Honda into the flow of the oncoming traffic and dashed ahead about a hundred meters to the mouth of the underpass. There was a line of pillars down the middle of the road. They supported the tunnel roof and separated the two directions of traffic. He stopped by the last pillar and reached down to unclip his dazzler.

Something caught Carver's eye.

At the mouth of the underpass, coming toward him, was a battered white Fiat Uno. It was doing the legal speed, fifty kilometers per hour, and therefore going less than half as fast as the car and bike racing toward its tail.

Carver's eyes narrowed as he pulled out the laser. His mouth gave a quick twitch of silent irritation. This wasn't part of the plan.

The Mercedes and the motorcycle were closing on the little white car at breakneck speed. There were a hundred meters between them. Fifty. Twenty.

The Merc came roaring up behind the Fiat in the right hand lane, then swung left, trying to overtake it. The bike rider had no option. He had to go around the other way, squeezing between the right-hand side of the Fiat and the tunnel wall. Somehow, he shot through without a scratch, rocketing out the far side of the Fiat.

The Merc wasn't so lucky. The front of the car, on the passenger's side, caught the Fiat from behind. The Merc smashed through the Fiat's rear lights and crumpled the thin metal of the Fiat's rear panels.

The tunnel walls echoed with the cacophony of screaming engines, smashing plastic, and tortured metal. But inside his helmet, Carver felt isolated, unaffected by the chaos that was rushing toward him. He could see the driver of the Mercedes struggling to regain control as his vehicle careered across the road. The guy was good. Somehow the car straightened out. Now it was coming straight at Carver.

Carver stood as immobile as a matador facing a charging black bull. He raised the laser, aimed at the windshield of the car, and pressed the switch.

The blast of light was instantaneous. A beam of pure energy exploded across the ever-narrowing gap between Carver and the onrushing Merc. It took only a fraction of a second, then the beam was gone.

The Mercedes lurched to the left. Somewhere, deep in the unconscious, animal part of the driver's brain, some sort of alarm signal must have registered. He slammed his foot on the brake, desperately trying to stop the car.

He had no chance. The two-ton Mercedes smashed into one of the central pillars, instantly decelerating from crazy speed to total immobility. But there was just too much speed, too much weight, too much momentum. The shattered car bounced off the pillar and skidded across the road, spinning around as it went. It finally came to a halt in the middle of the road, facing back the way it had just come.

The front of the Merc looked like a Dinky Toy hit by a baseball bat, with a gigantic U-shaped depression where the hood and engine had been. The windshield was shattered, as was every other window. The driver's-side front wheel had splayed out from the side. On the other side, the wheel had been jammed into the bodywork. The roof had been ripped from the passenger side, jammed down into the passenger compartment, and shifted two feet to the left. The pressure from front and top had forced all four doors open.

There was no sign of movement from the passenger compartment. Carver knew that the chances of anyone surviving that kind of an impact were minimal. In the corner of his eye, he saw a car drive past him, on the other side of the road, going into the tunnel, past the Mercedes.

Meanwhile, the Fiat was completing its journey out of the tunnel. Carver caught a glimpse of shock and terror on the driver's face. Then he noticed something else. There was a dog in the front seat. It had its tongue out, panting happily, oblivious to the destruction disappearing behind it.

Carver strapped the laser back on the gas tank of his bike. He was tempted to go down and check the wreckage to make sure the target was dead, but there was little point. In the unlikely event that anyone had survived such a devastating impact, there was nothing Carver could do about it without leaving some sort of forensic trace. And even if Ramzi Hakim Narwaz was still alive, he wasn't going to be plotting terrorist activities anytime soon.

It was time to go. At the far end of the tunnel, Carver could see a couple of pedestrians, standing and watching, unable to decide whether to walk any closer to the scene of the accident. In the distance he could hear the mosquito whine of motorcycle engines. People were coming. They would have cameras. They would be followed by cops, ambulances, fire engines.

Carver didn't want to be around when they got there. He needed to get away before anyone figured out that this wasn't just an unfortunate accident. He swung the tail of his bike around 180 degrees and headed back up the exit ramp of the Alma Tunnel.

The other motorcycle pulled up two hundred meters farther up the road, on the Avenue de New York, just beyond the vast neoclassical expanse of the Palais de Tokyo, home of the Paris Museum of Modern Art.

Grigori Kursk placed his feet on the ground astride his Ducati M900 Monster, sat upright, and raised his visor. His eyes burned with the rapacious hunger of a man for whom killing was not just a job but a compulsion-one that he would gratify whether he was paid to do so or not.

He turned to look at his passenger, who was just stowing the camera in a basket on the side of the bike.

"Did you see that?" he crowed, speaking in Russian. "Did you see the look on that driver's face? The poor bastard didn't know what to do. Well, he's just French pate now!" He paused for a second, then continued more calmly, getting back to business: "Okay, that was just as easy as I promised. Now, let's pick up the other half of the money."

"Just pick it up fast, I'm in agony back here," his passenger replied. "My knees are up around my ears."

Kursk laughed. "Ha! I thought you liked it like that!"

He drove on another few meters till he found a gap in the parked cars just big enough for the bike. He positioned himself facing out from the curve, giving himself just enough clearance to see the exit of the tunnel. He then took a night-scope from the chest pocket of his biker jacket and held it up to his right eye, through the gap in his helmet. He was looking for the man who'd been on the bike at the far end of the tunnel.